Stories about the people, science and research of the Medical Research Council.

Posts tagged ‘patients’

How often do PhD students get to meet patients with the disease they spend hours toiling away trying to combat? Probably not often enough. Here Alex Binks, an MRC-funded PhD student at the University of Glasgow, tells us about how an encounter with patients and some coloured balloons helped him step away from the lab bench and think about his research in a new way.

Alex Binks (Copyright: Alex Binks)

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I was told I had to prepare a ‘project pitch’ for the MRC patient engagement event. The task required us to communicate our research in three minutes or less to a room full of bright-eyed patients, who were genuinely interested in what we do.

This is the first year of my PhD and, maybe rather surprisingly, nothing I had been taught during my undergrad degree had forced me to think about science and research in this way. Not only did I need to think about how to make the attendees understand why I do what I do, but I needed to make it interesting too.

My research focuses on using viruses as potential anti-cancer drugs, and the ways in which they lead to cancer cell death. But how to capture that in a three-minute talk? Read more

Researchers work with animals to make discoveries about disease and develop treatments, but how much do patients know about animal research? Here Julian Walker from Genetic Alliance UK describes a project putting patients and carers face to face with animal research, and reports on their reactions.

There is a voice that’s often missing when we talk about research using animals. While those for and against such research debate the ethics and practicalities, the people animal research aims to help — patients — are rarely heard from.

That’s something we want to change, and why we teamed up with Understanding Animal Research and six UK universities to give 25 members of families affected by genetic conditions an insight into the role of animals in building knowledge and improving treatments for their own conditions. We did this by running ‘discovery days’ at local universities. Read more

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